As we Americans move toward another Independence Day celebration on the Fourth of July, we almost certainly will hear repeats of various versions of how and why the United States was founded.
Here are some elements of the founding stories that have been -- and continue to be -- prominent:
* We were founded as a Christian nation.
* God chose the U.S. to be a beacon of freedom to the world.
* Our first settlers came here to escape religious persecution and, once they had set up communities, insisted on religious liberty for all.
* Our founding documents, especially the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, are testaments to the deep religious -- usually Protestant/evangelical Christian -- faith of the founders and provide a path to keep America a nation of faithful people far into the future, a future safely in the hands of Divine Providence.
Or, alternatively:
* Most of the Founding Fathers were Deists as products of the Enlightenment and they let religious language slip into civic discourse and some of the founding documents without really meaning much of it.
There's more, but you get the idea, and if you've been paying the least bit of attention as a resident of the U.S., you've heard all that and more in various forms.
But how much of it is literal history and how much of it is historical myth created to shape the story of the nation?
Steven K. Green, in his expansively researched and eminently readable new book, Inventing a Christian America: The Myth of the Religious Founding, leans heavily toward the latter, and does so persuasively. (The book has a July 1 publication date but can be ordered now.)
Green, a professor of law and director of the Center for Religion, Law and Democracy at Willamette University, does not come off here as a far-left agnostic/atheist out to dismiss any role of religion in the nation's founding. Not at all. Rather, he wants us to know that the story of the role religion played in the creation of the U.S. is complicated, nuanced and easy to misconstrue. Indeed, the people who try to sell you the statements in the five bullet points above do exactly that.
Green puts it this way:
"In short, the idea of America's religiously inspired founding was a consciously created myth constructed by the second generation of Americans in their quest to forge a national identity, one that would reinforce their ideals and aspirations for the new nation. This process of reinterpreting the founding began as early as the late 1790s but gained momentum in the second decade of the following century as a new generation of leaders arose who had little first-hand knowledge of the founding period. In seeking to construct a national identity that conformed to their own religious sentimentalities and political aspirations, they invented a myth of America's Christian path. The myth was not intentionally deceptive -- in fact, it was quite the opposite. Proponents sought to uncover a more 'accurate' explanation for the momentous events that had transpired a generation earlier."
For Green, the term "myth" does not mean some false account designed to make a point but, rather, a "unifying narrative" that seeks to explain how things happened the way they did.
One of the strengths of this book is that the author has dug through extensive original sources and then sought to interpret the words and thinking in those sources not through 21st Century eyes but through the eyes of the times in which they were written or spoken. He acknowledges that "attempts to resolve the controversy over America's religious origins are generally doomed to failure," but -- unlike, say, a Bill O'Reilly who dreams up such inanities as a "War on Christmas" when he wants to talk about religion -- Green considers the evidence and draws unemotional conclusions based on a reasonable reading of the facts.
As Green notes, "The fundamental problem with the Christian nation debate lies in how various sides use the historical data and the assumptions they draw from that evidence." And, he says, "a fundamental error among proponents of America's Christian origins is that they tend to accept the substance of founding-era statements at face value." Or, as I say, as if words back then had no context different from those same words said or written today.
The fact is that the United States wasn't born a mature adult in a flash. As Green writes, "The creation of the United States was a slow, protracted process, with conceptions of nationhood coming much later for most people." In the same way, Christianity itself was not born in an instant (no matter what Pentecost Sunday preachers say). Rather, it slowly and often reluctantly parted from the First Century Judaisms (plural) that gave it birth. In that way, to call Pentecost the "birthday of the church" is a founding myth similar to the bullet-pointed myths about the U.S. that I listed above.
The idea that all the early settlers in America practiced and advocated religious liberty for all is simply untrue. Indeed, many groups that came to this country wanted to create, if not theocracies, at least societies that would conform to the religious norms the groups advocated. But after the American Revolution, the notion of religious liberty became much more enshrined and "was unprecedented and advanced among the nations at the time." And that's worth celebrating, even if sometimes freedom was more of a theory than a reality in some places. Before the Revolution, of course, it was a different story: "Even affording mere toleration to dissenting beliefs and practices was alien to Puritans," Green reports.
This is a thoughtful book that I hope finds a wide audience because of our need today as Americans to understand our own history so we can honor what should be honored, acknowledge what should never have happened and create a future that is in harmony with our core values, which in many ways have religious roots, though often not in the ways the national creation myths suggest.
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ANOTHER ASSAULT ON HOLY GROUND
I read with great sadness this story about a fire in northern Israel that gutted part of the Church of the Loaves and Fishes. I visited that pilgrimage site in 2012 and took this photo of the fish that are kept in a small pool there as a reminder of the New Testament story of Jesus feeding thousands of people by starting with just a little bread and a few fish. If, as seems likely, this was a case of arson, I hope the perpetrators are caught and given the toughest penalty possible. An attack on anyone's sacred space is an attack on everyone's, as the horrific shootings in Charleston, S.C., this week proved one again.
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